SCI-Arc NEWS

The SCI-Arc 40th Anniversary Benefit Dinner & After-Party hosted this Saturday on our campus in downtown Los Angeles raised $400,000 to support the school’s mission of educating the next generation of architects and designers. The event’s success strengthens SCI-Arc’s commitment to attract the best talent from around the world.

The benefit dinner celebrated SCI-Arc’s forty years of innovation and architectural experimentation, and the school’s devotion to finding radically new responses to the real needs and aspirations of today’s world.

The program included filmed messages from the four SCI-Arc directors, a special 40th anniversary film screening, and speeches by board of trustees chairman Jerry Neuman, Eric Owen Moss, and undergraduate student Deborah Garcia (B.Arch ’17).

The SCI-Arc building was transformed by an amazing showcase of some of the best student projects from undergraduate, graduate and post-graduate design studios and seminars. The dinner space designed by SCI-Arc faculty member Alexis Rochas featured an array of custom-designed polygonal tables and color-coded tabletops with hues arranged in a unique pattern of syncopated color values. A large-scale media installation showcased a SCI-Arc timeline streaming across the walls over the course of the evening, alternating images from the SCI-Arc archives, visuals of faculty, student, and alumni work, and snapshots of campus life.

Hundreds of SCI-Arc alumni, faculty and students joined dinner guests for an after-party held outdoors in the SCI-Arc parking lot. The Storm Cloud pavilion designed by faculty members Jenny Wu and Dwayne Oyler of Oyler Wu Collaborative hovered over the after-party. The installation made use of the existing structure of graduation pavilions from 2011/2012, and played off of the contrast between the existing rectilinear structure and a new system of eccentrically curvilinear elements at the bottom of the columns. A new spandex fabric was stretched between the two contrasting frames, creating the dramatic illusion of a transformative and undulating canopy. Complementing Storm Cloud outdoors were The Paths by Alexis Rochas, a set of five self-supporting, semi-circular lightweight structures defined by bold color transitions that linked the dinner area with the after-party.

The proceeds of the 40th anniversary celebration will benefit student scholarships at SCI-Arc.